Posted by Gateway Guest Blogger on Saturday, August 9, 2014, 4:00 PM

Guest Post by Mara Zebest

Gen. McCaffrey is dismayed at the internal politics and useless pinprick bombing strategy. McCaffrey feels the strategy reveals “muddled thinking” and is only designed to make it appearas if Obama is doing something.

Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd he is “dismayed” by President Obama’s strategy in Iraq, and that it demonstrates “muddled thinking.”

“If you’re going to protect refugees, 50,000 people without water and food, you don’t do two F/A-18 strikes on an artillery unit somewhere in the vicinity,” McCaffrey insisted, criticizing Obama’s decision to authorize “pinprick strikes” against ISIL in the Sinjar Mountains, where tens of thousands of Yazidis are trapped as they flee from ISIL terrorists.

“It looks to me as if a lot of this is internal U.S. politics to show we’re doing something,” McCaffrey said. “I mean, if you’re going to use military power, you have to write down your objective and then use decisive force to meet your objective. So I’m a little dismayed at what we’re up to here.”

“I think we have muddled thinking on what we’re trying to achieve in Iraq,” McCaffrey remarked, arguing that “for the last year, we should have been equipping them and supporting them. We didn’t because we were concerned about maintaining a centralized Iraqi state with Maliki, who acts as a Shiite despot.”